On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 21:29 +0100, Sylvestre Ledru wrote: > Le lundi 28 janvier 2008 à 15:13 -0500, Ross Boylan a écrit : > > On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 06:38 +0100, Christophe Prud'homme wrote: > > > in my opinion the scope is quite broad : it spans the "sciences of > > > computing", > > > So pkg-scicomp should definitely not host all possible "science" > > > packages. > > > > Speaking only as an onlooker, I thought the original idea (for > > pkg-science) was to make the group for all (packaging of) > > science-related stuff. "sciences of computing" sounds like "computer > > science" to me, which is quite a bit narrower. I think you have > > something different in mind than either "all science" or "computer > > science," but I'm not sure what. > Actually, it I'm not sure what "it" refers to. > was the original idea. However, to work, we need a > "critical mass" to work... And this mass is already existing on scicomp.
My interpretation of what has happened is that pkg-science proposed for packaging scientific software; it was pointed out that pkg-scicomp already existed and people could just join it; David Bremner asked about the scope of pkg-scicomp, and in reply Christophe Prudhomme said it was broad and included the type of application prompting David's query. However, his description of the scope sounded different to me than "scientific computing," and he said that the scope didn't include all science. I see at least two grey areas: there is a lot of infrastructure that is widely used in science (statistics, mathematics, numerical analysis, optimization, cluster support); and there are things that are clearly scientific but might not be considered scientific computing (table of elements, instructional systems, fly-by simulations of the solar system). Another way of putting things might be "is pkg-xxx to be the packaging analogue of this list, debian-science?" As I said, I'm just trying to follow what's going on and help clarify the proposals. Ross > > If we are confident that both will exist and work, let's go! > > Sylvestre >
